Joshua March: Introduction

Catch up!

Friendfeed acquisition

$50m in stockAcquired the team

Leading to new search…

Facebook lite

Oh, and @ ‘ tagging’…

A better inbox!

A better inbox (cont.)

• Updates from fan pages historically had miniscule conversion

• All Facebook found that the new change has improved this – so don’t overlook anymore

What not to do

Jump the shark fin!

Most (seeded) apps look like this

Instead of… like this

Why?

• Everyone wants to be ‘viral’

• Virality is how many users join based on the activity of other users over a period of time (my own definition).

• E.g. for every user engaging in the app, another user engages for each time period (a viral rate of 1 = true viral)

But…

• A viral rate of 1 is extremely difficult – it’s normal to be much lower (e.g. for every 10 users you get one more in each time period)

• So – if people only use your app once, there’s only one time period. If you seed it to ten people, you’ll only get one more user.

The answer

• Retention rate!

• To make your app spread virally, you need to keep people coming back.

• Even with a viral rate of 0.1, if you’re users come back every week, they’ll double every ten weeks

Turn this… (50% retention)

To this (99% retention)…

And if you get the viral right as well, maybe even this….

Thank you!

• Contact me – josh@theiplatform.com

• Follow me on twitter: @joshuamarch

• Some blogs to read:

– http://andrewchenblog.com/

– http://lsvp.wordpress.com/